Yipit teaches every employee to code

By Thinkful

Vin Vacanti, CEO of Yipit, just published a blog post in which he details how and why every Yipit employee is learning to code. He argues that even non-developers at tech companies are more productive if they can prototype or at least speak the language of tech. He describes their actual process for teaching employees: they mix content, projects, and mentorship to get employees to the right level as efficiently as possible.

I’m excited to see Yipit adopt a model of education that mirrors our’s. Working with our first 25 students, I’ve seen the compounding effect when you combine high-quality content, project-based learning, mentorship, and (the one piece he doesn’t mention explicitly) an environment conducive to sticking to one’s goals. We’re similarly putting our first marketing hire through our own front-end development course. I expect we’ll be hearing positive results from Vin in a few months, if not sooner.

From his post:

“Along the way, we’ve built a curriculum. Each person gets paired with a more experienced developer and goes through the program:

We then get a very basic understating of our web framework, Django, by working through the Django Tutorial

Everyone spends a day coming up with a super basic idea for a fun web app that they might use with their friends or family

We then spend the next two weeks getting practice building a web app by working through more Django tutorials including a todo, blog and calendar apps

Once done, they’ll spend two weeks building their own simple web app based on what they’ve learned

From there, we’ll spend some time learning the basics of systems work by getting their app deployed on Heroku, they can dive more into HTML/CSS and strengthen their knowledge of programming via Udacity’s course

The goal isn’t for everyone to become full developers but rather for everyone to learn the language of tech startups, to make better decisions, to become more self-sufficient, to truly become entrepreneurs within Yipit.”